Biography
Chelsea Kaplan is a Research Investigator in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center (CPFRC). She completed her undergraduate degree in Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science and received her doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2018. For her graduate work, Chelsea was co-mentored by Dr. Rick Harris at the CPFRC and Dr. George Mashour, director of the Center for Consciousness Science. Her thesis examined functional connectivity and brain network organization in patients with chronic pain, and how a non-pharmacological treatment (transcranial direct current stimulation) alters these functional brain networks to cause analgesia. This knowledge could lead to more informed stimulation sites and personalized treatment (pharmacological or alternative treatment, most effective stimulation site) based on network connectivity at baseline. As a Research Investigator at the CPFRC, Chelsea will continue to use neuroimaging and advanced network analyses to understand how the brain is contributing to the perception of pain in chronic centralized pain conditions.